Victorian Bibliomania: The Illuminated Book in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Alice H. R. H. Beckwith

The power of the English currency has been, till of late, largely
based on the national estimate of horses and of wine: so that
a man might give any price to furnish choicely his stable, or
his cellar; and receive public approval therefore; but if he gave
the same sum to furnish his library, he was called mad, or a
bibliomaniac. And although he might lose his fortune by his
horses, and his health or life by his cellar, and rarely lost either
by his books, he was yet never called a Hippo-maniac, nor
Oino-maniac; but only Biblio-maniac, because the current
worth of money was understood to be legitimately founded
on cattle and wine, but not on literature. The prices lately
given at sales for pictures and MSS. indicate some tendency
to change in the national character in this respect, so that the
worth of our currency may even come in time to rest, in an
acknowledged manner, somewhat on the state and keeping
of the Bedford Missal, as well as on the health of Caractacus
or Blink Bonney. — John Ruskin

Editorial note: In creating this amplified web-version of the original catalogue, I have worked in the spirit of those Victorians who collected and created illuminated books by adding decorated initial letters from Victorian and later books to Alice Beckwith's text. A few, like the P in the commentary for Westwood's Paleographia Sacra Pictoria and the T in Henry Noel Humphrey's A History of the Art of Printing, were created by Thackeray for Vanity Fair; others come from Victorian periodicals and other books. — George P. Landow.